Turn 29 of 36

Stay with him in the kitchen until morning comes

Hermione does not go back to bed. She sits in the kitchen chair with her feet tucked beneath her and her hands curled around a glass of water she has drawn from the tap, and the minutes pass without announcement. The icebox hums. The oven ticks. Outside, the streetlight on the corner flickers once and holds. Draco has not moved — his hands flat on the table, his shoulders dropped, his face turned three-quarters toward the window where his faint reflection watches him from the dark glass. Neither of them speaks. The silence is not empty. It is full of the things they have already said and the things they have not, and it holds them both without demanding more.

At some point — she does not track when — he shifts. His right hand lifts from the table and finds the glass of water and he drinks, slowly, and sets it down and his thumb remains on the rim, tracing the edge in a motion so small she would not notice if she were not watching. She is watching. She has been watching him for an hour and she has catalogued the details the way she catalogues everything — the way his left shoulder sits lower than his right, the faint scar above his eyebrow that she has never been close enough to see before, the way his breathing slows when he is not performing calm but actually approaching it. She is learning him. She does not decide to learn him. It is happening the way the binding magic happens — without permission, beneath thought, in the place where instinct lives.

"My mother does not know about the fourteen days," he says. It is the first words either of them has spoken in forty minutes and his voice is hoarse with disuse.

"She does not know about the conjugal presentation. She thinks we have a month. She thinks the first event is a dinner at the Ministry in October and that it will be manageable. She does not know that an inspector is coming to this flat in — " he checks the clock on the wall, its face pale in the dim light, " — eight hours."

Hermione sets her glass down. "You asked me to help you keep it from her."

"I did."

"Why?"

He is quiet for a long time. The clock ticks. The icebox hums. Somewhere on the street below a car passes and its lights sweep the ceiling and are gone.

"Because if she knows what they require — what they require of me, specifically, in public, with a woman she was taught to consider beneath her — she will do something. I do not know what. But it will be decisive and it will be expensive and it will cost my family more than the inspection costs me. My mother does not lose things. She does not allow things to be taken. She will fight and the Ministry will make her pay for it and I cannot — " He stops. His jaw tightens. The mask does not come back up but something worse happens — his expression closes anyway, without the structure of the mask, without the armour, just a man pulling a door shut with his bare hands because there is nothing else to hold.

Hermione reaches across the table. She does not decide to. Her hand moves and her fingers close over his — his right hand, the one that was tracing the glass rim — and his skin is cold and dry and his fingers are very still beneath hers. The binding magic surges. Not warm — hot, sudden, a flash behind her ribs that steals her breath, and she feels it in her wrist and her palm and the place where her skin meets his. His hand turns beneath hers. Not to hold. Just to face palm-up, open, vulnerable in a way she has never seen any part of him be. His fingers curl slightly around hers. He does not look at her. He looks at the window.

"We will get through the inspection," she says. "We will get through it and then we will tell her together. Not before. Together."

"Together," he repeats. The word is barely audible. His fingers tighten once around hers and then release, and he withdraws his hand and stands and the chair scrapes softly against the floor and he is at the door and he says without turning, "Try to sleep. The inspector will come at nine."

He goes. His footsteps creak down the hall and his door closes and the flat is quiet again. Hermione sits in the kitchen with the taste of the word *together* in her mouth and the binding magic still burning in her palm and she does not sleep. She sits until the window turns from black to grey to the thin, hesitant blue of a London morning, and then she stands and washes both glasses and dries them and sets them on the rack and goes to her room to dress for the inspection.